Meet Navtoj Altaf, the artist crafting her experiences into practice

From child sex abuse to the dispossessed in Russia, her work reflects her curious, questioning personality

One of the nicest people to inhabit India’s art world, Navjot Altaf’s intellectual heft also makes her one of its scariest. Diminutive in real life, the kohl-eyed artist with a penchant for tribal motif bindis is like a cracker perpetually waiting to explode, an inferno of rage against injustices perceived, experienced and acknowledged. There isn’t much she doesn’t know about subversive politics and its impact on the marginalised. Unlike many armchair theorists, Navjot — she prefers to get by with only her first name — has chosen to live an alternate reality that goes beyond mere books and seminar halls. Quick to rage, her eyes are thoughtful, even sorrowful. Just as Arundhati Roy uses her writings to prod and provoke, Navjot’s art practice is an excoriating indictment of social disparities and ecological disasters wrought by political and capitalist processes. 

For now, she is enjoying her moment in the sun. The first living woman artist’s retrospective — a gender slant that’s bound to leave her uncomfortable — is on at Mumbai’s National Gallery of Modern Art. It is within walking distance from her alma mater, the Sir JJ School of Art, where she went from Meerut for the possibilities the city offered her in 1969. Mumbai then was a very different place — it was Bombay, to begin with. Textile mill strikes, closures and labour unrest were brewing across the city’s slums. When the Emergency followed, Navjot found herself involved in printing protest posters by night. As a member of the Progressive Youth Movement (Proyom), she had worked in labour colonies, displaying posters there while simultaneously exhibiting and viewing works in galleries — a contradiction at the time about how two different socio-economic and proletarian or privileged classes looked at and consumed art. 

She had been drawn to Marxist ideology, as were many students and young intellectuals at the time, and found support in friend, mentor and, later, husband, Altaf Mohammedi (he too preferred to drop his surname) who proved an adept partner in honing her mind, though her responses remained her own. “I remember our professors asking us to free ourselves from the burden of a subject matter and turn to the subconscious,” she says. “They emphasised self-reflection to understand what and why we were doing what we were doing.” 

Altaf’s more privileged life opened doors for a more expansive education, not least of which included their eclectic reading choices: Camus, de Beauvoir, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Gorky, Sartre and, from their own circle, Nissim Ezekiel, Eunice de Souza, Dnyaneshar Nadkarni, Gieve Patel and, of course, Marx, Mao and Lenin. Altaf’s friends included filmmakers, writers and political activists, and she inherited them too. Travel became another shared interest, but not as mere holidays, both preferring to learn about cultures and their impact on history and society. 

They might have shared similar passions but Navjot and Altaf did not always see eye to eye where their practice was concerned. Six years her senior, Altaf could not wrap his head around the idea of installations, particularly the need to dismantle them. For Navjot, this was an important aspect towards which her practice was moving. She thought little of abandoning the comforts of home and city to set up an intervention centre in Bastar where she made a second home for herself. In 1997, following a meeting with Adivasi artists Rajkumar Korram, Shantibai and Gessuram Viswakarma, she set up Dialogue Interactive Artists Association (DIAA) with them. This community-driven, interactive process — which keeps her in Bastar for parts of the year — has become a seminal, collaborative contemporary-art model. Nor has she been restrained in her choice of material to just the conventional or the traditional, using the digital, video and film to communicate her concerns for the subjugated and ostracised.

Installations are an important aspect of Navjot’s art practice

In Bastar, she chose to develop an interconnectedness with the people, their lives and her work. “The discovery of minerals in the region has led to a development agenda of single-minded focus on faster growth and faster profit for a select few — which does not mention local disputes, environmental carnage and political/cultural disruption,” she explained to Zasha Colha while discussing her artistic trajectory independent of Altaf’s journey. “Taking away agricultural land, forests, rivers and people’s riparian rights without any regard for the existence, identity, and cultural sovereignty and knowledge systems of the Adivasi or the laws pertaining to these areas by the private, national and multinational industries for mining and power plants, which further exclude people from conservation actions, has been increasing conflict, resentment and poverty. After being there for a considerable period of time, one can understand the workings of slow violence which has occurred gradually and out of sight. The Maoist movement, too, is a result of uneven development and social injustices prevailing in the system for centuries.”

Her choice of subjects can range from the exploitation of nature (explained, on occasion, through her interest in insects that she says are at the cusp of this interconnectedness), the environmental risks humanity faces, the impact of mining on tribal communities as well as the environment, while not immune to the sufferings experienced in urban groups and societies. The massacres in Gujarat, she says, “raise not only a question of massacre and justice” but also “a level of impunity built into our political system which is affecting the constitutional democracy of India”, she told a group that attended her walkthrough at NGMA last month. Nor does she confine her views to any one discourse to the exclusion of others. “I find his works extremely theatrical,” she said of Francis Bacon, finding a parallel resonance in his paintings of mutilated bodies and heads with her own explorations in which she “looked at the flesh in the context of the commerce involved in the aborted foetus cells, which are used in cosmetics by the pharmaceutical industry”. Or take her project, Palani’s Daughter, which questions “the glorification of motherhood in the context of a mother killing her newborn daughter to appease the patriarchal desire for a male heir for which she is jailed but not the ones who impose the very special pressure on her to give birth to a male child…” Did I mention her research and insight is scary?

From the effects of the Bombay textile mill strikes to the riots in Gujarat and Mumbai, from the fetishisation of the female body to the politics of sex workers, from child sex abuse to transgender rights, from the testimonies of riot victims to the dispossessed in Russia, her work reflects her curious, questioning personality . “These concerns and issues that call for resistance in these times are not very different from the approach to power and the politics of power that have persisted for 200 years,” she said at the same walk. Curator Nancy Adajania, who recently authored a book on the artist, The Thirteenth Place, notes that Navjot’s work is process-oriented rather than medium-centric. “She has refused to base her art on the creation of individual masterpieces — typically a male prerogative — that can be consecrated within the connoisseurial system,” she writes. “Instead, her art has been premised on the act of searching, plotting and re-structuring the course of meaning through a life of artistic and civic interventions.” 

In other words, Navjot continues to be the art world’s poster child for rebellion and resistance. Despite her intimidating knowledge and opinionated interventions — or precisely because of them — she is widely admired. Despite a scare or two.